Nearly unbiased maximum likelihood estimation for the beta distribution

We analyze the finite-sample behavior of three second-order bias-corrected alternatives to the maximum likelihood estimator of the parameters that index the beta distribution. The three finite-sample corrections we consider are the conventional second-order bias corrected estimator (Cordeiro et al., 1997), the alternative approach introduced by Firth (1993) and the bootstrap bias correction. We present numerical results comparing the performance of these estimators for thirty-six different values of the parameter vector. Our results reveal that analytical bias corrections considerably outperform numerical bias corrections obtained from bootstrapping schemes.